James Baldwin Box Set

A box set of James Baldwin’s principal novels, featuring Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk.

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood. With lyrical precision and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.

Giovanni’s Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. One of the first novels to openly explore the theme of homosexuality, it paved the way for generations of gay and lesbian novelists.

And If Beale Street Could Talk is a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime --a profoundly moving novel about love in the face of injustice that is as socially resonant today as it was when it was first published.

This stunningly designed slipcase with art by Baldwin’s friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney will make the perfect perennial gift and keepsake.

JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.